


You Dared to Kiss the Face of Night

by bildungsromantic



Category: The Borgias
Genre: Gen, Season 1 Spoilers, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-02
Updated: 2012-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-06 14:35:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/419994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bildungsromantic/pseuds/bildungsromantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucrezia grows into her cruelty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Dared to Kiss the Face of Night

Lucrezia grows into her cruelty. 

She breaks her mother’s heart with Giula’s name, but that’s not what she wanted — not at first, not exactly. It’s just that she doesn’t understand where they stand now, her mother and her father, with God and Giula between them. Holy Father, she must call him, and her mother does not call him anything at all. It is best, he says, if her mother keeps her distance. But what does Giula call him?

Her mother’s face changes when Lucrezia tells her. Lucrezia wonders what hurts more, her betrayed love or her betrayed pride, and wonders whether she can trace the end of her mother’s happiness in the thinning of her lips, the draining of her cheeks. The black eyes gone dull. It is a wicked thought, another betrayal, but that doesn’t stop her.

The beauty of Giula Farnese, her presence in the Holy Father’s rooms, these are the pins she presses into her mother’s heart. She is curious. She wants to see bloodshed. She wants to see pain. In this moment, Lucrezia feels like a monster, hungering to hurt, though she is sorry, so sorry, that it must be her mother whom she injures.

With her husband, she is never sorry. The rigged saddle, the broken leg, the spilled water. Making love to Paolo while her husband languishes, her bliss all the better for his agony. Sometimes it is so good that she can’t imagine being happier if he’d been kind.

Lucrezia knows Cesare will kill Giovanni Sforza, if she tells him the truth. But that’s not what she wants. What she wants is to kill him herself. She imagines dragging a dagger across his throat, or splitting him open belly to heart, so he can know how it feels to be ripped apart. Poison would be easiest. She could watch him choke on his drink, watch him die knowing that she was the one who did it. But then she remembers Djem, and his strange, sad death, and she can’t quite bring herself to it.

At home, Cesare says she is no longer a child. He’s right. Her hands, soft and white and small as they are, can hurt. Her sweet mouth can smile with bitterness. It can smile at pain. Though she loves with fullness and color, embraces her brother, kisses her father, adores her mother, though she is bright and golden amidst all their darkness, she knows she is not without shadows. Sometimes even she must shy away from the sun.


End file.
